Currently in day 3 of the "seeding" process required to get the thing running.

Is the miner biased towards a powerful computer? As in, if you had a super fast fully loaded desktop, would you be able to mine faster? Does that give you an advantage? Sorry I am not exactly up to speed on this whole thing works.

Btw, what miner do you use? Is there a good one you recommend for beginners?

quote:Currently in day 3 of the "seeding" process required to get the thing running.

Nearly 30 hours straight and I'm as recent as 149 days ago in transaction seeding.

I like this.

yea, getting started can be slow. you are essentially verifying every transaction ever. this takes a while.

couple questions:

are you running the standard bitcoin client? if so, what version? the latest version, 0.8, dramatically speeds up that process (from taking like 3 days to taking around 3 hours)

as for mining software, what are you running? are you a member of a mining pool?

what kind of mining hardware do you have? if you are just using a CPU then you will just be wasting your time. If you are using GPU's or FPGA's then you make make a few coins but it still probably won't be worth your efforts. the new ASIC chips have started to become available and they are making mining with anything else obsolete.

quote:Is the miner biased towards a powerful computer? As in, if you had a super fast fully loaded desktop, would you be able to mine faster?

It's biased towards AMD (Radeon) graphics cards. The mining is done by using the graphics card(s) to solve complicated formulas (in a nutshell). The AMD cards are much, much better than the GeForce cards in this regards.

re: Installed my first bitcoin miner...Posted by WikiTiger on 2/27/13 at 8:54 am to Lsut81

quote:But how the frick do you "Mine" for a currency?

You use hardware to perform complex mathematical operations that when solved result in the award of a set amount of bitcoins. This process also secures the bitcoin transaction ledger and because of this, the miner also collects any transaction fees included in that block*.

*A block is where bitcoin transactions are stored and a new one is generated about every 10 minutes.

quote:What is backing these funds up?

The value of bitcoins are based on supply and demand. They have no "backing."

quote:You use hardware to perform complex mathematical operations that when solved result in the award of a set amount of bitcoins. This process also secures the bitcoin transaction ledger and because of this, the miner also collects any transaction fees included in that block

quote:perform complex mathematical operations that when solved result in the award of a set amount of bitcoins.

And Mr. Yakahomo Hashatori Ono, aka, Bonzai!, didn't keep the keys to the formulas in his back pocket? Would you be interested in buying (or leasing) a bridge over the Mississippi River in Baton Rouge which I own?

2- It is NOT EASY for the computer amateurs. There is not very good documentation and help is mostly doled about in heavy tech talk. (I think this is somewhat by design so that all the geeks can mine the coins until they are all mined lol)

3- Why did I start? Curiosity and ability. I have a couple PC's that are online 24x7 and mostly don't do very much so why not?

4- What are my expectations? I'll be thrilled if over time my pc discovers a bitcoin block and I get 50 bitcoins. Then I dunno. I'll have 50 bitcoins.

5- I am NOT an 'investor' or trader or anything else with this. Just had some time to roll out a miner and figured I'd give it a shot.